


Day of Epiphany

by Tyellas



Category: Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense, Hellboy - All Media Types, The Shape of Water (2017)
Genre: A pinch of Lovecraft, Angst, Christmas, Complete, Drama, Folklore, Friendship, Gen, Ghosts, Holidays, Magical Realism, Mild Gore, Pain for a Reason, Psychic Abilities, Recreational Drug Use, Weapons, draw Abe like one of your French girls
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-06
Updated: 2018-12-15
Packaged: 2019-09-06 14:11:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 5
Words: 18,811
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16834192
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tyellas/pseuds/Tyellas
Summary: Abe Sapien/Shape of Water crossover! With a winter holiday setting, ghosts from the past, and a holy day that unites blessed water and meeting a god…Abe Sapien wants to find out what he is. What he’s destined for. Whether he’s man or monster. Maybe those who remember a certain Creature, from Baltimore in 1962, can tell him. Some of them are still around. In an artist’s studio, in Baltimore, in South America. And their gifts, both kind and cruel, will lead Abe to his own Epiphany.





	1. This Christmas Tide

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Totallyottie99](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Totallyottie99/gifts).

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> At the BPRD, Christmas isn’t the same without Hellboy. Abe Sapien shares a holiday moment with the BPRD’s women – Liz, Panya, and Kate – and takes his first steps to find those who survived the Creature. 
> 
> This story is a gift for the delightful totally_ottie!

For a secret government organization, the BPRD did well at Christmas.

Somehow, they always resolved a poignant, yet uplifting, paranormal case on Christmas Eve. The next day, if Christmas morning was a little quiet, Christmas dinner made up for it. Off-duty staff trickled back after family time. The raucous, boozy dinner was topped off by ridiculous presents. It was one of the things that made the BPRD not just a custodian for its handful of paranormal beings, but something like a home.

That was what Abe Sapien had always thought. He ought to know: he was one of those paranormal beings. Between earth and water, man and fish. Nobody could say what he truly was, or what his destiny would really be.

This year, it didn’t take Abe’s perpetual identity crisis for his Christmas to fall flat. For the towering red-cheeked man who made the paranormal Yuletide jolly was away. Abe’s best friend, Hellboy, was gone.

Abe Sapien had done his best to lead BPRD teams in Hellboy’s absence. He had done the job well enough. Everyone had gone along with the quiet fish-man giving considered orders. But he knew he couldn’t compare to Hellboy’s brio, the feeling others got when Hellboy was charge: that the devil himself was on their side. Sliding into the background for Christmas had been a relief.

When it came to making the Yuletide gay without Hellboy, Johann Kraus, of all people, had come to the fore. The German psychic wasn’t letting not having a body stop him from enjoying the holiday to the fullest. He now had everyone gathered around a showing of Germany’s traditional Christmas viewing, _Dinner for One._

The lonely, drunken comedy wasn’t to Abe’s taste. He noted that Liz Sherman was hanging back, too.

In the shadows, Abe eased over to Liz. “You all right?”

Liz shrugged. “This movie, or whatever, reminds me of the shit I used to do whenever I tried to leave this damn place. Shit I’ll probably do again.” She lifted a plate from a nearby table. “Want to come with me to visit Panya? I saved this for her pets.”

Silently, Abe followed Liz. They walked through dim halls, past bookcases, cabinets of curiosities, locked doors. His pyrokinetic friend stayed quiet, dressed in her everyday black and white, her crucifix heavy at her throat. Abe knew that she felt Hellboy’s absence as much as he did, if not more. Perhaps she’d open up after they saw Panya.

Panya was another paranormal being sheltered by the BPRD: a revived mummy rescued from a cult. She earned her keep as a psychic. She and Liz, with their shared rebellious streaks, had a definite rapport. Abe, himself, avoided Panya. He had reasons.

It was easy enough to say he’d been busy. 2006 had put the BPRD, and Abe, through the wringer. There had been frog monsters to fight, like violent, degraded versions of himself. Their rescue of Panya from the oceanic cult holding her prisoner. Dark truths around Abe’s origin, leading him to disown his past. And, recently, an eldritch fight that stopped the moment their antagonist mistook Abe for a different being: the Baltimore Creature.

The last one stayed with Abe. By BPRD standards, the original incident was minor. One paranormal being, a possible river god, had been torn out of place by a government agency in 1962. Two weeks of strangeness had been resolved with relatively few deaths and the creature’s escape. The survivors who’d tried to help the creature had gone on with their lives, happier than they’d been before. 

It inspired Abe to ask Panya if she knew more about what kind of creature _he_ was. What his future would be. Because he had a spark of hope, at last, that the news might be something he could bear.

Would he ask Panya tonight? He’d see what her mood was. She might discuss it as a Christmas gift – if the former Egyptian cared about Christmas at all.

Panya lay in festive state. Her room reminded Abe of a museum. The walls were curtained and hung with art, the lights dim and warm. Music played in the background. There was ample space around a high, narrow bed, like a catafalque. Usually, the space was for a wheelchair. Tonight, some of it was taken by a narrow Christmas tree, its ornaments rich and subdued. Panya’s two pets, a kitten and a bird-monkey chimera, were batting around wrapping paper. And both Panya and the woman sitting by her, Kate Corrigan, wore askew paper crowns.

“Liz. And Abraham. Welcome.” The revived Egyptian looked every day of her three thousand years, etoliated and gray-brown. But she was smiling. 

“Brought this for your critters,” Liz said. Panya’s bird-monkey flung itself at the plate with shrill screams, clacking its pelican beak. Liz laughed and gave Panya’s kitten a final scrap.

“How good of you, Liz. Thank you. Do you know, this time was always my favorite holiday. The rebirth of the Sun God as a handsome youth, in my first Egyptian life. Later, I woke up to Christmas in Victorian England. I am enjoying a Christmas,” said Panya, with somber cheer.

So one thing Abe had wondered was answered, right away. And that sent a chill down his spine.

Kate held up a colorful twist of paper. The room’s warm light erased her middle age, made a halo of her short blonde hair. “I got Panya some British Christmas crackers. That’s where our crowns come from. We saved one for you, Liz. Abe, if we’d known you were coming…”

“It’s fine.”

“Go on, Liz! Have a pull!” Panya said it like it was the naughtiest thing possible.

Liz took one end of the cracker Kate was holding out. “Three….two…one!” As Kate held and Liz pulled, at Liz’s pyrokinetic touch, the cracker exploded, like a mini-firework. Kate and the bird-monkey shrieked. The kitten vanished.

“I’m sorry!” Liz cried.

“There’s a little snapper inside – you must’ve set it off,” said Kate. Abe stomped out some tissue paper on fire.

As Liz coiled in on herself, folding her arms, Panya held out her own crimson paper crown. “There, there. No harm done. Take mine. It is your color.”

Kate said, “I’m pretty sure I got Abe’s joke in mine.” Abe accepted a slip of paper from Kate. “You have to read it aloud.”

Abe read, “Who brings baby sharks their Christmas presents? Santa Jaws.”

Liz moaned, “That’s _so_ bad.” Abe saw her smile again.

“The riddles were just as dreadful in the 1850s,” Panya said.

As Liz put her crown on, the music shifted to something deep and dulcet. Kate started. “Oh, I love this one. The Wexford Carol.” They all fell silent to listen. A woman’s voice sang, clear and slow:

_Good people all this Christmas-tide, consider well and bear in mind, what our good God for us has done, in sending his beloved son…_

Listening, Liz said, “I didn’t hear this one growing up.”

Kate whispered, “It’s very old.”

_The night before that happy tide, the noble virgin and her guide…_

The three women’s faces softened as they listened, together. The kitten re-emerged, to pounce on the bed beside Panya. Abe smiled a little, himself. Even if his best friend was gone, it was good to be around others who were friends.

_Prepare and go, the angels said, to Bethlehem, be not afraid…_

Abe met Panya’s deep eyes. She bowed her head slightly. As she did, Abe felt his sense of self…not disturbed, exactly. _Rummaged._ As if Panya’s sixth sense traced a touch through the currents of his deep self. Feeling it, he knew this was why he had avoided Panya. But here, now, he held her gaze, offering himself until the sense receded.

_Attending on the lord of life, who came on earth to end all strife…_

The last notes of the song shivered away.

Panya broke the quiet. “No, we haven’t got a cracker for you, Abe. But you seek what belongs inside one: the riddle and the crown.”

After the cracker cheer, Abe wouldn’t have chosen to talk about this now. But here they were. He went to stand next to Panya’s head. “Yes. I was a man, once, transformed into this. But I don’t know what I am now. What I might be. Do you know? After your time with that cult?”

Panya sighed dryly, a rustle of papyrus. “You took your time asking…and I was relieved. Because I do not know what you are. I even think that if those who held me prisoner for so long knew you existed, they might have plotted differently. For that cult worshipped a sea-god. I know _why_ you were created – ”

Abe stiffened. “I don’t want to talk about that now.”

“But not what you might be in your freedom.” They paused. The Christmas music, now uplifting violins, hit another sweet moment. When it ended, Panya said, “Let me consider. Search my deep memories. I would rather not do so in these holy days.”

“Of course,” Abe said.

He caught Liz muttering, “Reply hazy, ask again later.”

Panya made a gesture that took in both Liz and Abe. “You both miss your friend. Hellboy.” With great effort, Panya levered herself towards the small tree to pluck one of its ornaments. She held it out to Abe. “Christmas is his holiday. But Epiphany will be yours.”

Abe accepted it. It was an elongated, eight-pointed star, light but sturdy, painted gold. “Thank you?”

With that, Panya settled back. Both her pets came to her. “Take your holiday while you can, Abraham.”

Abe felt definitely dismissed. Shielding the ornament in his hand, he drifted towards the door. Kate stood up. “I might call it a night, Panya. Liz, will you be here a while?” Abe caught Panya’s wry smile, the psychic knowing herself managed, however kindly. Liz took Kate’s seat. Kate left with Abe.

The corridor was dark and echoing. Kate slipped off her yellow paper crown to twist it in her hand. Abe felt their regular BRPD roles, her director of field operations to his “enhanced talent” agent, settle around them.

Ten paces out, Abe blurted, “I didn’t mean to – ”

“I know. Panya just pulls it out of you. Or you pull it out of her. You pick up vibes about places and things, about people when you touch them. She reads minds and the future. The two of you together are like water and more water. Just too deep.”

“Do you know what she meant by this?“ Abe lifted the star.

“Following yonder star.” Kate inhaled. “In a lot of Christian cultures Epiphany is the holiday they celebrate, more than Christmas. It’s the day or eve when someone – shepherds, Wise Men, saints – meets Jesus. A time of theophany, coming face to face with a god.”

Abe found himself smiling again. Kate was coping with his oddness through her folklore-professor mode, he thought. Until she said, “It’s associated with water.”

“Epiphany’s a lucky day to be baptized. Many churches do a Great Blessing of the Water. People will go for winter swims, retrieve a cross thrown in the sea. Ships are allowed to sail again, after avoiding winter storms. Is that what you’re thinking of? Some sea exploration?”

Abe’s skin twitched. Kate’s words had him wanting a plunge in sea water. He thrust the craving aside. “I’ve got a new lead about, uh, me. That case of the Baltimore Creature, from 1962. If Panya doesn’t know anything, or isn’t telling, the people involved in that might. From their different angle.” Abe tucked the ornament into one of his vest pockets, the one over his heart.

Kate hummed, “Mmmm. Plus, after recent events…it’s not only your business.” Kate turned her kind, tired eyes up to him. “Any chance you could follow up over the next week or so? While things are quiet? I can arrange cover for you, and some budget.”

Heartened, Abe said, “I could. The best lead’s in South America.”

Kate’s mouth twisted. “I should have said a _little_ budget. We’re on a shoestring until the New Year. Until then, fifty states and Puerto Rico are all yours.”

“I appreciate it, Kate.” Abe said, “I can start with a contact tomorrow. Giles Dupont. He’s the oldest one. He’ll probably be around for visitors. Like we are.” It felt good to plan something. To do something for himself, this once.

Kate chuckled, “Around for visitors…one way of looking at what we do…”

They were at the door that led to the BRPD’s parking area. Kate opened it. “Welp, this is me. Good night, Abe. Merry Christmas.”

“Late for that, isn’t it? Almost midnight.”

Halfway through the door, Kate paused. “Not if we’re counting Epiphany. If we are, today’s just the beginning.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hellboy and BPRD: For Hellboy/BPRD, I was picturing movie canon, with the comics' Bureau of Paranormal Research and Defence in the background. Abe has his low-level 'reading' psychic powers here - he can read the history of an item, or, if he's touching a person, perceive something of their minds. 
> 
> From a movie canon perspective, this is set between the first and second film. For a BPRD comics canon perspective, this would be post- _Black Flame_ and _Garden of Souls_ , and pre-Fenix. All that aligns well enough with the end of 2006, when this story is set. 
> 
> One reason I'm inclined towards movie canon is because it seems lighter, more hopeful - the kind of world that _would_ have Elisa and the creature's fairytale in it. 
> 
> \- _a bird-monkey chimera_ \- one of the animals from the _Garden of Souls_ BPRD storyline.  
> \- _the naughtiest thing possible_ \- 'a pull' _is_ the naughtiest thing possible if you're British!


	2. Saint Stephen's Day

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Seeking answers about what he truly is, Abe Sapien talks to Giles Dupont – but is Giles’ fairy tale from troubled times what he needs?

The next evening, Abe traveled through upstate New York, shielded by the early dusk. The woods and houses were softened with twilight snow. It was as perfect as a Christmas card. Except it was the day after Christmas. Boxing Day, the day for servants and beggars to receive largesse. Saint Stephen’s Day, the day of Jesus’ first martyr. An appropriate day for Abe go to Giles Dupont and beg for information.

Giles Dupont had been tightly involved in the 1962 events around the Baltimore Creature. Afterwards, Dupont had stayed a free man. Somewhat. The BPRD had supervised him ever since. Dupont’s public career, from the late 1960s to the mid-1990s, had him as an innovative painter, bringing the body into modern art. In 2006, most assumed that Dupont was enjoying retirement, or had quietly passed away. But he had been ordered to withdraw from the public eye.

Dupont had said, in his 1962 interrogation, that the Baltimore Creature had healed him. It took until the open-minded 1970s for someone official to believe him. It wasn’t until 1992 that Dupont’s minders began to realize how thorough that healing had been. For Giles Dupont looked much the same as he had in 1982. And 1972. And 1962.

Would living two men’s lifespans have Giles in the mood to talk? Or would he hate and fear the Creature who might have given him Swiftian immortality – and Abe, too?

Abe was on Giles’ doorstep, now. The house was Victorian, right down to the brass door knocker, shaped like a swimming fish. Abe removed the broad-brimmed hat and scarf that concealed most of his head and face. Then, he knocked.

“I’m coming! I’ll be there!“ The door opened on a wholesome-looking white man. Giles Dupont was a little crinkled with age, though his hair and mustache were still tawny, and he still favored sweaters. He was, unusually, as tall as Abe.

As Abe expected, Giles gaped at him. Hellboy had advised Abe, long ago, “Just show up. Tell ‘em what we are in advance, folks get worried. Scared. Just show up and be reasonable and three-quarters of folks calm down.”

Abe had tried to encourage that here. “Mister Dupont. I called you from the train station. As I said, my name is Abe Sapien, and – “

Giles lit up with a wild smile. “It’s YOU!”

Abe felt his gills collapse, embarrassed. “Um. Sir. I regret to say I am not – “

“Oh, no, no, don’t worry, I don’t mean that you are – you’re talking - I saw you in a lab! In the late Seventies. I wanted to talk to you then, but they wouldn’t let me. And here you are. This is _wonderful_!” Giles clasped his hands. “Please, don’t get cold. Come in, come in!”

Abe stepped inside. Usually, when Abe was in a house, it was a paranormal crime scene. This wasn’t. It was bright and messy, warm with wood and artworks, inhabited by plants and cats. A real home.

“I set a fire in the downstairs sitting room. Zelda passed away this spring – it was her favorite time of year – and this was her favorite room. She’d be delighted to have a fish-man in here.” In passing, Giles elbowed a stack of unopened mail, which fell over.

Giles clasped his hands again. “I thought I’d have a lonely Christmas this year. But it’s been very full! Would you like some eggnog?” When Abe said yes, Giles whisked off, turning on a record player as he went. The hiss of vinyl was followed by gentle music. _You'll never know just how much I miss you..._

The music wove itself into what Abe sensed about the house. Its three stories and four walls seemed barely enough to contain Giles’ exuberance. There was something else, too. Not malevolent. Part of the warmth and charm. What was it?

Abe was hovering around a portrait propped on a side chair when Giles returned. “That was Zelda. She never wanted it in these rooms while she was alive. ‘Could have painted me thinner,’ she always said. But I wanted to capture her as she truly was…our friend.”

“It’s amazing,” Abe said. Uncanny might have been a better word. For the woman in the painting had a knowing look, as if she said to Abe, from wherever she was now, _here you are at last, took your time, didn’t you?_

With teacups of eggnog and a plate of devilled eggs at hand, Giles finally sat down. His brow crumpled as he leaned in. “You said you were…from the government. I hope I haven’t done anything _wrong_?”

“Oh, no, no, sir.”

“Please, call me Giles. And tell me what I can do for you.”

It was this easy? Abe found himself, suddenly, inarticulate. “You helped the Baltimore Creature, years ago. Did you…was it…if you compared it to myself…”

Giles leaned in more. “That was why I was brought to see you in the lab! To answer that question. I wondered if you might be – but it hadn’t been long enough. 1962 to 1978. And you were definitely an adult male.”

“You wondered if I was one of the creature’s children. That’s the one thing I definitely know, that I am not,” Abe said, ruefully.

Giles, too, was crestfallen. But he went on. “You see – I knew the creature. Charlie, I called him. It seemed friendlier, to give him a name. You’re so different from Charlie, to my eyes.”

“And you are an artist,” Abe said.

Giles sent a hand to sketch the air. “It’s all about the body, you see. Your head’s very different. Then there’s your muscles, your skin, the way you hold yourself. Right now – you sit with intent. Like, well, like I do. I can see you thinking! Charlie was,” Giles sighed, “A pure creature. Something from nature. So much more innocent.”

Giles gazed down into his cup. “That was what it came down to, that time in the lab. I could say what you weren’t, after knowing Charlie. But that didn’t help me say what you were. I am sorry. It must be lonely…”

Abe took his time nibbling a devilled egg, though the lump in his throat made it hard to swallow. “Does the name Dr. Robert Hoffstetler mean anything to you? He helped the creature, too. And worked for the government, afterwards.”

Giles lit up again. “He was a genius! So brilliant. We were…close, until he, ah, left this mortal plane. One of his favorite things to do was to speculate about you. Who you were, where you came from. He was just starting to consider if you might be, well, I’d call it magic, when he was taken from us.”

Giles’ bright gaze was becoming disconcerting. “At the time, I didn’t think you were magic. But having you here tonight, like something from my dreams…I’m wondering, too. But I’m no expert. All I have is my own story of what really happened back in Baltimore, if you want it. It’s not the same as what’s in the records, I’m told. At the time, Hoffstetler said it was all him. But I don’t see any harm in sharing what really happened, now.”

“That would be most helpful,” Abe said.

There was a long, excruciating silence.

It ended when Giles sculled his eggnog. “It’s strange. Sometimes I feel like I’m bursting with the story, but now that I can tell you…do you mind if I draw you while we talk? We could go up to my studio.”

“Not at all.” The BPRD’s paranormal agents weren’t allowed to let themselves be photographed. But Abe knew that rule inside out. And it didn’t say anything about being drawn. Especially by famous artists.

Giles’ studio was like walking into the inside of Giles’ head. Abe tried to read the place, but it was sensory overload. Giles was a collector. Thousands of items here had their own stories. Fifty years of art, from Giles and others, covered every vertical surface that wasn’t a bookcase. Stacks of books and canvases teetered. A vast window looked out over a nearby lake, barely visible in the night. There was a fireplace up here, too. Giles chucked more logs onto the second blaze, then rolled up his sleeves. “What do you prefer? A chair? The divan? In front of the fire?”

Abe removed his trench coat and went to a Stickley chair. “I’ll sit, thank you. Do you want me to take my vest off?”

Giles smiled. “Oh, keep it, please. It’s rugged!”

He perched on a stool, a pad and charcoal on his knee. “This is how I used to sketch Charlie. Except I can ask you to turn towards the light a bit, and you’ll understand me. Wonderful. Thank you. Now…the story. The story I tell myself. And one or two other people, oh so rarely…”

His voice smoothed, like a vintage-radio announcer, like a dream. “It sounds like a fairy tale now. Should I tell you about the time...? It happened a long time ago, in the last days of a fair Prince’s reign. Or should I tell you about the place? A small city near the coast but far from everything else. Or should I tell you about her? The princess without voice. Or perhaps I should just warn you of the about the truth of these facts. The tale of love and loss, and the monster that tried to destroy it all.”

“It began on September 17th. The night the cocoa factory caught fire…” Abe caught the rasp of charcoal on paper. Giles had begun to draw.

Listening by the fire was soothing, almost meditative. Giles began by describing one of the conspirators, his neighbor, Elisa Esposito: a Depression orphan, plucky and sunny for all that she was mute. There was plenty about himself, bitching about a former employer, sighing over a misguided infatuation. The creature surfaced from the deeps of Giles’ memory, into the story, not via Hoffstetler, but through Elisa.

“Elisa said to me – it was the most she ever signed to me, ever - _The way he looks at me. He doesn’t know what I lack... Or how I am incomplete. He just sees me for what I am. As I am. And he is happy to see me, every time. Every day. And now I can either save him now or let him die. Never see his eyes, see me again. I will not let that go.._.”

Abe felt his eyes widen. In Giles’ story, Elisa, not Hoffstetler, was the one who’d planned to break the creature out!

Giles swallowed. He took off his glasses and cleaned them. Abe’s sharp vision caught the glint of a tear.

“I…I was a fool. I said to her, there was nothing we could do. That we were nobodies. That this creature wasn’t even human. I didn’t say anything about the time I was arrested in a gay bar raid. Simply awful. Elisa didn’t know how ruined her life could be. It was still a smack in the face when she signed to me, _If we do nothing, neither are we_.” With a sniffle, Giles replaced his glasses.

Giles’ story surged on, into improbable success, even romance between Elisa and the creature. Hoffstetler’s part was minor, in this version. As Giles told his truth, sketch after sketch slid off the pad. He shifted to a small easel and watercolors. His swooping, flowing brushstrokes increased Abe’s sense of the otherworldly. He felt himself dwelling on Giles’ energy…the feel of the man…a sense of him being outside of time’s cruel flow.

The story itself turned to this. “I was drawing Charlie, like I’m drawing you now. He looked, well, I thought he looked kind. I saw so little kindness, then. I found myself unburdening myself to him. Talking about time and loneliness. I said, _Seems like I was born too early or too late for my life…maybe we’re both relics._ ”

Yes. That was it. A moment in time was preserved, here, wrapped around this man. Like the creature had sensed Giles’ possible apotheosis, his best self, and healed him to achieve it. Tonight in particular, with his piscine subject and his story, that long-ago was curiously close.

Giles’ ending matched the official records, witnessed by multiple military police. Hoffstetler, shot. The creature, shot. Elisa, shot. The creature reviving. Their antagonist, Strickland, calling the creature a god, right before his throat was slit. The creature diving away with Elisa’s body.

“Now I’ve come to the end. What should I say? That they lived happily ever after? I believe they did... That they were in love - that they remained in love? I’m sure that is true...But when I think of her, of Elisa, all that comes to mind is a poem. Made of just a few truthful words... Whispered by someone in love, hundreds of years ago...”

Abe was moved by their love and Giles’ own caring delusions. Such a love as had been between the creature and Elisa – Abe could believe in it for somebody else. Clearly, the creature had some energy or destiny Abe didn’t.

What about Giles? Abe could, so easily, be like him: tuning his entire life around a perfected past. Abe had tried to channel that, at times. He had been a nineteenth-century man before his transformation. Sometimes, now, he tried to be what that man should have been – good, kind, proper. Yet seeing timelessness have a hold on someone else, however perfect it was for them, made Abe’s own self step back.

Abe asked, “Why didn’t you tell that story at the time?”

“By the time they talked to us – we’d been held for two days – Hoffstetler had already said he was the main conspirator. That Elisa was acting for him. He was trying to protect the rest of us. Whatever we said, they saw it based on that. I guess they liked being outsmarted by a scientist better than by one of their janitors.”

With the recent past in mind, Abe asked, “Did you ever want to see if the – if Charlie made it back to the Amazon?”

“I’m not supposed to leave the country,” Giles said. “Signed that away back in 1962, after the shouting and government interrogation were over.”

“Ah. But if you could?”

Giles shuddered. “I hear those expeditions are dreadful, even today. I am absolutely not one for roughing it.”

“Did anyone else ever come to ask you about all those events?”

Giles dodged this with a smile. “You’re as bad as my FBI friend.”

Of course Giles would also be supervised by another agency. Abe asked, “Your case manager?”

“Heavens, no. The son of our antagonist around Charlie. I never thought I’d be friends with Richard Strickland’s son, but here we are. Tim’s a nice…no, that’s not the word…” Giles paused.

“Tim is a good…” A second pause.

Giles shook his head. With a tilted smile, he said, “Tim. Is a persistent bastard. His father’s son. But he is on my side. And in times like these, don’t we all make our deals with the devil?”

“In what way?”

“He’s trying to help me get my old art back from the government. On the side of the angels at last, like his sister.”

“His sister,” Abe echoed.

“I met them both when they were college kids. She came up here because she felt bad about her father shooting Elisa. Three days after she found out, she had to apologize, hauled Tim along. An absolute angel.” Abe frowned. For angels did exist, messengers of the divine, far stranger than humans liked to picture them. Their speeches began with ‘be not afraid’ for a reason.

Giles drew a sketchbook from a bookcase full of them, opening the one he held to _January, 1973_. “I can never resist an interesting face. And young Strickland’s shoulders were something.” Most of the sketches were loose, vibrant caricatures of a slumping young man. A third of one page had a drawing in a tighter, Leyendecker-like style: a stern young woman, with the fantastic element of a saint’s halo.

Giles saw Abe look to her, and he sighed. “From what Tim told me, she’s with the angels now. She wasn’t young, none of us are any more, but…” The largest log in the fire collapsed, went dim.

“I’m sorry to hear that,” Abe said, calmly. That was in the BRPD files that had brought the Creature to his attention. Tim’s sister had been forced to join a misbegotten hunt for the creature in South America. She’d died there of amoebic dysentery, as if the Amazon’s waters themselves had been protecting their god.

“Right after Thanksgiving. It’s been shock after shock for Tim, this year. He might have something for you.” Abe watched as Giles scrawled out Tim’s contact information. Strickland’s son was in Baltimore now? Interesting.

Giles was going on. “Dare I say, you might have something for Tim, as well. I hope I did for you.”

Abe felt Giles had, though he couldn’t put his finger on what, exactly. “Absolutely. I can’t thank you enough, for your time, and your stories.”

Giles gave Abe a long, considering look. “What I said before…I take it back. You’ve got something of Charlie’s innocence, after all. That purity.”

Abe said, ruefully, “A friend of mine always says that. It would be nice if, for once, everyone said I was irresistibly handsome.”

Giles twinkled. “Now, I never said you weren’t handsome! Look at these drawings and you’ll see!” They went through Giles’ work from the night. Abe chuckled, feeling himself blush. Giles definitely had an eye for swimmers’ shoulders and arms.

Giles gave Abe two of the sketches, wrapped around a long, thin paintbrush to keep them from being crushed. One was the most handsome-flattering drawing of Abe himself, touched with watercolor, Giles’ signature sprawled generously across the base. The second one was unsigned: a sketch of that rougher, wilder amphibian man, with a slender woman. Elisa Esposito. “Don’t tell the FBI I gave you that one! I’m never supposed to draw them. But with _you_ visiting, surely it’s an old man’s flight of fancy.”

A grandfather clock struck: it was midnight. Abe said, “I should go.”

“Of course. I suppose you need to swim. I’d offer you the tub, but the water’s very chlorinated here.” Abe had put up with worse than chlorine in water for the BPRD, but he let it stand.

Giles walked him down. “Don’t be a stranger. Are you based nearby?”

“Not anymore,” Abe said, regretfully.

“And I don’t drive much anymore. Call before you come next time and I’ll set up my easel for oils.”

Abe took himself out the door. A few cats darted up. Giles cracked the door for them to slip inside. Abe waved back. He should bring Hellboy, if he ever returned to Giles’ golden sanctuary.

Midnight was bitter-crisp, sharp and starry. The cold stabbed Abe’s gills. He knew what he wasn’t, more than ever. And what he didn’t want to be. He didn’t want to be trapped in his past, or in his unknown future. Like a dry egg in the desert sand, mummified until some shape of water touched it. Yet the not-being and not-wanting weren’t answers.

As Abe went to his car, the vintage lyrics from Giles’ first record came back to mind, plangent, haunting. _You’ll never know if you don’t know now…_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Giles' visit to view Abe in 1978 is in this short piece here, [Hellboys and Gentlemen.](https://archiveofourown.org/works/14405238/chapters/33268203)


	3. The Devil's Chase

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Still trying to learn if his future overlaps with an amphibian man’s past, Abe Sapien seeks out Richard Strickland’s son. Together, they hunt history through the gritty streets of Baltimore.

It didn’t occur to Abe that Just Showing Up again might not be the best plan. Not for a man who’d lost both his father and his sister to hunts for the Baltimore Creature: Tim Strickland.

Another nightfall brought Abe to central Baltimore. He paused at the address Giles had given him. On this gentrified street, a red-brick rowhome soared through several window styles to one crimson peak of a gable. There was some light inside, but it was an eerie blue glow. Abe had left messages to no reply. Normal people, Abe realized, might have gone on vacation. Just as he was about to try a third call, the front door opened.

A towering white dog slid out into the rain-slicked cold. The pewter-haired man who held her leash was preoccupied by locking, then testing, the door. Abe let him get down the steps before walking over, removing his hat. “Good evening! Are you Tim Strickland?”

The man had to be. He was the right background, the right age, in his fifties. Not, like Giles, preserved in a perfect moment. But still hauntingly like his father’s photographs, down to the square face roughened with a few moles on one side.

Tim stared back at Abe in thunderstruck horror. The dog’s leash slipped from his hand.

“I was just about to - ”

“FREEZE, MOTHERFUCKER!” Abe found himself looking down the barrel of a pistol.

The dog chose this moment to fling herself on Abe. “Good girl! Sic ‘im!”

Abe braced himself, because, in one of life’s flukes, he’d met this dog once before. Clearly, she remembered Abe. And that Abe was _delicious_. She leapt up to put her paws on his shoulders. There wasn’t much thought to the animal. Still, Abe felt her radiant delight. She slobbered over him, circled to show her owner-shaped person what she’d found, then returned to lap him more.

Abe looked over the dog to the man. “I don’t think you’ll have to shoot me. She seems determined to lick me to death. Um…I'm Abe Sapien. Giles Dupont sent me.”

After a deep, ragged breath, Tim said, “Jesus fucking Christ. Giles told me you were coming. He never said you were – Jesus.” He lowered the pistol. “Giles always does this. Thirty-three goddamn years I’ve known him and he never misses a chance to fuck with me. You’re BRPD?”

“Yes!” Abe opened his trench coat to reveal the badge fixed to his vest.

Tim leaned in. Abe and this man were, again, the same tall height. Tim’s half-gray hair was slightly too long for its cut, slightly dirty. He should have shaved that morning. He wore a boxy parka and navy corduroys laced with dog fur. Jerking back, he said, “Giles told you I’m FBI, right?”

Abe caught that Tim’s gaze was permanently unbalanced by one dilated pupil. “Yes.”

“I have office hours, you know.”

That nettled Abe more than having a gun pulled on him. “I can’t exactly show up.”

Tim looked Abe up and down. “Why not? I see worse things than you before breakfast. You’re not the only weird shit around. Half the time lately, BRPD doesn’t wipe their own ass. FBI forensics does it for you – that’s me.”

Between Tim’s tarnished-brass Fed vibe and harrowed eyes, the man was as close as a standard agent could get to being BPRD. Abe decided that, despite the pistol and their mutual annoyance, he could trust the man for the moment.

“Did Giles tell you why I’m here?”

Tim crammed the pistol back into a hidden pocket. “Nobody fucking tells me anything. Giles calls, one in the morning, his usual poetic fairy-tale shit. I owe the guy. It's a long story. So I said, whatever, send your latest boyfriend down. At the last minute he throws in that you’re BPRD. Must be nice to not officially exist. But everyone at the Bu’s heard rumors about you. And a couple others, too. What are you?”

“I was hoping you could help answer that.” Abe handed Tim the dog’s leash. While he did, he tried to get a reading on the man. But all he got from Tim was the mental equivalent of static. He must have shocked Tim far more than the man’s bravado let him show.

“You want to talk about the – the thing my father brought back. The gill man. The Devonian.”

Abe said, “I know you’ve seen the records around the case.” Tim had seen them right before Abe did, early October this year. “Since you were Strickland’s son…do you have any more information?”

Tim’s mouth tightened to a short slot. “Hope you’re up for a walk. This dog doesn’t stop.” Abe took that as a yes. Given her head, the dog dashed forwards. Abe and Tim fell into a fast shared stride after her, like two hunters drawn on a trail.

Abe nodded towards the dog. “She’s a beautiful animal. But quite large, for a dog. Not everyone could handle her.” He said that on purpose. Abe had come to terms long ago with not being the manliest man in the room. Any male spending time with Hellboy either did that or went mad with testosterone poisoning. Tim, Abe judged, would definitely have done the latter.

Sure enough, at a little flattery, Tim cocked his shoulders. “She’s a Borzoi, a Russian wolfhound. You should see her run. Bolt of lightning. All that shit about dogs being man’s best friend, turns out it’s true. News to me.”

Archetypes spun in Abe’s mind. The white wolfhound, bred over a thousand years to hunt. This man, whose job, too, was to hunt clues and fugitives. The winter night, buildings setting the wind keening. That last was the traditional sound of folklore’s wild hunt. The devil’s chase, hell-hounds and unseelie folk tracking a sinner. Such as Tim’s dead father, Richard Strickland.

No sooner had Abe thought that than Tim said, “We never had pets growing up. Pretty sure it went back to all that. My dad hunted the Devonian in the Amazon jungle. He came home convinced everything was a monster. Even a dog was a wild animal, not really tamed.”

“I took it as gospel. I was a kid, y’know? I thought my dad was a hero. A super-agent on secret missions. Overseas for the government, fighting commies, soldiering on when he got injured. For half my life, he was hard to live up to…” Tim's gravelly monologue trailed off.

Abe asked, “Did your father tell you about capturing the creature? It would have been an exciting story.” Abe could just picture it: the sharp-suited man, his admiring little boy, a being like himself treated like an animal.

“’Course he didn’t. He was a professional.” Ouch. “All we knew at home was he’d done a big job for a general. Knowing the real deal, a lot of how he acted back then makes more sense.”

“Such as?”

“What he said about animals. Talk about military research for amphibious survival. He showed up one morning with his hand injured, like something had bitten him, bad. The hospital kept calling the house, trying to get him to check back in. Not that he was home a lot. When he was…he just stared through us kids. Like we weren’t there.” Abe’s lips parted, registering Tim’s bitterness. His longing.

To look at him, Tim was still tightly stoic. “Turned out Dad was a wreck at the time. Occam sent my mom the shit from his desk. My sister and I found it thirty years later. Codeine, liquor, more codeine, bullets, pictures of another woman.”

“Another woman?”

Tim gave Abe a cynical glance. “Someone who wasn’t my mom. Not his wife. Elisa Esposito.”

“That…wasn’t in the records.” It had been in Giles’ fairy-tale, though.

Tim drawled, “Let’s just say BPRD came in late, missed a couple things. Elisa did have it going on for a skinny chick. She was the one who broke the Devonian out back in ’62. My dad went out here to hunt him down again. Never came back. And, yeah, I saw the case records. I know my dad wasn’t all that. Tortured the gill-man, shot Hoffstetler, beat my mom.” Tim turned and spat. “Guess his chakras came and got him.”

Abe winced. “Perhaps you mean his karma?”

Tim waved a hand. “Karma, chakras, all I know about that shit is what my sister said. She always was a hippie… Dad would’ve… What was your dad like?"

“I don’t know.” He’d never thought, in fact.

“Oh, c’mon. There wasn’t a fish guy carrying you around when you were an egg? Like a seahorse dude?”

Abe said, drily, “I was a human, once. In a lifetime I hardly remember. I woke up as what I am now at the BPRD. Eventually, they stopped doing experiments on me. Once I had learned what the world was like today, I began to use my talents to help the government.”

“Huh. Freaky.” Tim paused in front of a corner store. “I need cigarettes. You gonna eat the dog if I ask you to hold her?”

“She’ll eat me first,” Abe said.

Tim’s laugh was dry, too. “You’re funny. A comedian. None of us Stricklands can carry a joke in a bucket…back in a minute.”

His brief absence was a relief. At times Hellboy had said, of some antagonist or bureaucrat, “He’s got a really punchable face.” Abe wasn’t quite there yet with Tim Strickland. But, for all that he was forthcoming, the man had a way of raising Abe’s hackles.

Tim came out holding two Styrofoam cups. He handed one to Abe. Coffee, black and sweet and terrible, the taste of every late-night mission. Abe let it warm him as Tim ripped open the cigarettes. Tim was old-fashioned about it, tapping one on the back of his left wrist three times before lighting it.

They walked a block, refueling in silence. Then Tim took them around a corner. The narrow street opened up. Even in freezing rain, Baltimore’s Inner Harbor was striking. Tall glass buildings, vivid with multi-colored lights and neon, made it the heart of the city. The black water reflected the lights in long, wavering streaks. 

As they reached the broad waterfront, Tim said, “That shit you went through at the BPRD, in a lab. Experiments. They’re using you like they wanted to use the other fish guy. As an asset. You want out? To escape, like the Devonian did?”

Again, this had never occurred to Abe. “I’m here of my own free will. And I will go back there the same way.”

“You sure? ‘Cause it sounds pretty shitty to me.”

Abe stiffened. “I assure you I haven’t described the further complexities of the situation.” He stopped short of _you don’t have clearance_. That would have Tim finding Abe punchable pretty quickly. Instead, he said, “Some of my colleagues are also my friends.”

Tim shook his head. “You’re as bad as Giles. That man’s too good for this world.”

Abe found himself admitting, “Besides, where would I go?”

Tim gestured at the harbor’s water. “Dive in! World’s your oyster! Swim to Margaritaville! No? _He_ did…come on.” The dog was still pulling at her leash. They followed her, their long legs eating up the harborside.

Tim went on. “Goddamn shame you never talked to Hoffstetler. You saw him in the records – yeah, I figured. Fuckin’ genius. If I’d ever had him as a science teacher, my whole life would’ve been different. I was with him on a job once, back when I was a field agent. Made me learn quantum theory to keep up with him. He was still pissed at my dad twenty years later. Out of anybody, he would’ve known what you are.”

Outside a restaurant, the dog stopped abruptly enough to trip Tim up. Abe saw the graceful animal nosing through some rubbish. “No. Fuck. No. Leave it, Falada! Fuck, trust this dog to find the only trash with maggots in it in midwinter.”

Tim pulled her away from a discarded doggie bag. Cracked crabs were spilling out, the white flesh in them, or on them, shifting... For one second, Abe’s mouth watered. He caught himself, horrified, and turned away.

“Must’ve been from that tourist trap there. See the neon? _Eat here, get crabs._ That’s Baltimore humor for you. You’d fit right in. Me, I transferred up here to move in with my fiancé. That’s the only reason I left Quantico.”

At this bit of FBI politics, Abe muttered, “Congratulations.”

“She works for the National Aquarium. That glass building, right there. Ever visit? You should. It’s awesome.”

Abe asked, “Tell me, would they let me out again?”

Tim laughed again, a short, dry _hah_. “Girls must love you. Any hot cleaning ladies at the BPRD? Or are super-type chasers more your thing?”

Abe went rigid. “That – is absolutely – none of your wretched business – ” He stalked ahead, struggling for a grip on his temper.

From behind him, Tim called, “What the hell? It’s just guy talk.”

Abe opened his mouth to protest – and stopped. Tim was right. Abe heard standard agents ribbing each other this way all the time. But all the things Tim was nudging him about – family, anger, sex, even freedom – didn’t occupy Abe much. Maybe that was like the shattered crabs that had looked _good._ Another sign that Abe wasn’t as human as he’d thought. As he’d hoped.

Tim caught up to Abe. “I’m curious, all right? I wanna know shit. You do too. That’s why you’re here.”

Just as Abe was about to forgive him, Tim tossed his cigarette butt into the harbor’s water. Abe inhaled to keep his temper. “Is there anything else you can tell me?”

“I can show you. Giles showed me, once… We’re here.”

Abe looked around. He’d gone past several piers and inlets without taking in his surroundings. “Where?”

The dog was still leading them, like she was used to this walk. She took them up a canal, past modern brick rowhomes. Their group stopped where the water ended, by a short loading pier.

“Where it all went down.” Tim pointed to the spot where the pier met the city’s concrete. “Where the Devonian escaped for good, back in ’62. Where my dad killed Elisa and got killed himself. Where the karma happened…”

Abe found himself shivering. “Can I look around?”

Tim shrugged. “It’s a public pier.”

Abe closed his eyes, briefly, for a true reading of the space. Its past rang through it: salt marsh, low-down harbor, gritty industry. Always washed by the tide, rising and falling. There, right where Abe stood, had been wildness and anger and trampled manhood, yearning turned to black hatred. Abe paced back until more emotions spiked: terror, wild love, courage strong enough for any sacrifice.

Heart aching, he circled between the two poles of emotion until something else opened. It was like a well dropping beneath his feet. A powerful reunion had taken place here, a mighty creature restored to its element. Abe’s own urge to dive into the water was profound. He stepped away from the pier, pressing down his own instincts.

Abe was startled out of it by a sense of static. Tim was shaking his shoulder. “Earth to fish dude? You zoned out, there.”

Abe collected himself. “Sorry. I was thinking. Tell me, you live near all this. Is that on purpose?”

“ _Now_ you want to get personal. This was not the plan. I’m a normal guy. All I ever wanted was to live up to my father, get together with the girl next door. It all kept bringing me back here. Now I’m here, talking to another fish guy.”

Tim was tapping a third cigarette against his wrist. After lighting it, he said, he said, “You know the first thing I thought, when I saw you? That you were _their_ kid. Out for revenge.”

“No,” said Abe, thinking of the elemental love that had paused here, so briefly. “No. I am definitely not their son.”

Tim exhaled, sending smoke curling. “Answers my big question. Guess if you were, you wouldn’t talk.”

Family, again. It reminded Abe of something else. He said, “Giles mentioned that your sister died recently. I’m very sorry to hear it.”

Tim flicked another cigarette butt aside. “We were too. Goddamn ruined Thanksgiving. That and sorting out her insurance – and _then_ she – “ Tim shook his head, teeth bared, back to the rigid man who’d pulled a gun on Abe earlier. “Fucking mess. At least I got the dog.” He scrubbed between Falada’s ears with rough fondness. She leaned against him, shedding on him.

“What was she like? Your sister, I mean.”

“Hard to live up to.” The same phrase he’d used about Richard Strickland. “Perfect grades, overseas adventure jobs, lucky in love. Ahead of the curve about everything. Including being pissed off at my dad.”

“Did you share what you learned about your father with her?”

“Those were confidential records.” Tim added, “We weren’t even talking when she went to Brazil. She always had to be right about everything, her goddamned business or not. Next thing we know, she’s dead.”

Abe backed off. “Have you been in touch with her, ah, partner? Hosna Al-Hazred?”

That dry, singular laugh again. “Figures you’d know she was gay. One of us had to be, keep Dad turning over in his grave. Hosna’s left the States – lost her work visa when my sister died.” The dog whined at Hosna’s name, weaving around Tim. “Not like she’d know anything either. She was all about life’s little shit. She got out of a major situation in Syria. It burned her out on taking anything seriously. I’d look into her eyes and – ”

Tim paused for a long, near-distracted moment. He was exactly where his father had died, and he’d gone grayish-pale. Abe felt himself go bloodless, too. Something powerful had happened here, and Abe had stirred its energies. Before he could shake the man’s shoulder, the wolfhound slid between them. She lifted her head for a weird, singing cry, then licked Tim’s hands. To Abe’s relief, Tim’s eyes snapped open.

Seeing Abe staring, Tim said, wearily, “I’ve got…a head injury. From that job with Hoffstetler. Sometimes it plays up.” He tapped below his dilated eye.

Abe murmured, “Of course. You were saying something about your sister's partner?”

That grayness returned. “Yeah. That I’d look into her eyes and see the void.”

Abe had nothing to say to Tim about that. He saw the dog still pressing herself against Tim. “Is she cold? Should she go home?”

Tim scrubbed the dog’s head again. “Nah. She’d stay out all night. Me, I’m freezing my balls off. Let’s go.”

They walked back in silence. The dog trotted ahead with a satisfied air, like she’d had a happy hunt. Tim turned up his parka collar as he chain-smoked, hiding while being present. Abe had plenty to think about, himself.

Talking to Tim made Abe reflect how Hellboy had modeled his fighting self on the hard-boiled swagger of agents and soldiers. Abe, too, had work that brought him people at their worst, a past that brushed against the unknown. But he’d never taken on that agent’s swagger. Tonight had given Abe another reason why he hadn’t, besides comparing himself to Hellboy. For Strickland’s son showed what happened when that failed. Tim’s kindness was sidelined by machismo, his curiosity given a cruel twist by the need to be on top. 

Besides, weighing himself against Tim’s goading, Abe felt he might be less human than he hoped. And less like the creature, as well. For the creature, from its energies, was further along the strange and godly path than any of the records had noted.

It began to rain. The cold was in Abe’s bones by the time they were back at the rowhome with the crimson gable. The lights were on properly now, warm and golden.

They paused in front of the tall steps. Abe said, stiffly, “I very much appreciate your time.”

Tim ground out his last cigarette, toed it into a sewer grate. “You change your mind about wanting out, give me a holler. Least I can do, after what my dad did to the last fish guy.”

The whole moment was Strickland’s son in a nutshell. Irritating, crass, generous. Trying to scramble out of his past’s wreckage. “Thank you. If you weary of the FBI, I’m sure I could help you with a transfer, myself.”

Tim huffed. “Goddamn comedian.”

The warm lights in the old-fashioned windows reminded Abe of Giles. Suddenly inspired, Abe asked, “Should I meet your fiancé? If she works at the aquarium…”

Tim said, crisply, “No. One thing all this shit around my dad taught me: guys like you are competition.”

Abe was still gaping in shock as Tim climbed the stairs. “G’night. Office hours next time.”

“But – “ Tim slammed the red door. Seconds later, the downstairs lights went out.

Abe stood there astounded for a full minute, cold rain falling.

Finally, Abe breathed. “You _asshole_.”

With that, he turned on his heel. New Year’s was tomorrow. And the day after that, he could see about South America.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Abe met this dog - and learned about his fellow amphibian man - in another story of mine, [The Case of the Baltimore Creature.](https://archiveofourown.org/works/14405238/chapters/37427165)
> 
> Tim doesn't think he's an asshole in his story from his decade-by-decade POV, [The Man of the Future](https://archiveofourown.org/works/13877352).


	4. Gift of the Magi

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Abe Sapien turns to a source in South America who may have seen the Baltimore Creature recently. But he finds himself between two perilous lovers. And they have some eye-opening Twelfth Night hospitality for Abe.

Abe was surprised that his final lead, now in Ecuador, was willing to help.

It wasn’t until January 5th that a red-eye flight got Abe to Ecuador's closest airport, Quito. In the dark of dawn, their local BPRD liaisons gave Abe car keys, local tech, an offer of company. Abe declined. He could tell they were afraid of him. Far more than of what he might be in Ecuador to handle.

If they had asked, it was simply a trip to talk to someone. To the woman Abe thought of as Tam Strickland’s widow. She had told Abe to meet her in a town called Tena.

The drive from Quito to Tena was five hours of downhill hell. The road plunged from the Andes mountains to the start of Ecuador’s jungles. Near Tena, signs taunted Abe with the promise of water: white-water rafting, river beaches, waterfalls. For Tena was one of the places where the Amazon’s rivers began.

Abe succumbed to one secluded stop. It was summer, here, sultry-hot at eleven in the morning. Bushy jungle leaves rustled over a cascading stream. Abe sank his hands and forearms in its water. Through his skin, Abe tasted laundry soap from upstream. The water was still very welcome. He did his best to read it. Was the Baltimore Creature there? Nearby, in any way? Nothing came to him.

He resisted the urge to submerge himself. A crackle from his trousers, as he knelt, had reminded him that he still carried Giles’ artwork in the long thigh pocket of these trousers. How could he have forgotten? He couldn’t bear to look at what his neglect had done to the man’s work. But BPRD’s Archives could do wonders to restore materials, he knew. He left the pocket alone and went back to his car. 

Abe’s GPS directed him right through little Tena itself, sparkling with its holiday decorations still, back up into jungle-clad hills. Finally, the forest opened for some grassy verges, a few houses with views. His GPS pinged. Abe had arrived. Opening the car window, Abe leaned on a gate’s buzzer. Iron bars ten feet high made a small fortress of this house, both stories wrapped in a dark wood veranda. 

Why had Abe thought this woman would pause in a normal rental in town? She was, after all, the scion of an ancient family of alchemists. Consecrated at her birth to the darkest of the Old Ones, Shub-Niggurath. A discreet sorceress who had tangled with the BPRD recently, summoning monsters, mistaking Abe for the Baltimore Creature. Hosna Al-Hazred.

When Abe pulled up, Hosna came out onto the lower veranda. Her dark mane was swept back from her ageless Syrian features. She brushed one loose wave away from crimson-glossed lips. A summery red dress wrapped her curves to swirl above tiny feet. “ _Ya Abraham!_ Welcome. I made cake.”

“That’s very kind. You didn’t have to.” With her lover dead, Abe hadn’t expected Hosna to be friendly. Yet the one time they had met, Hosna had treated him like a god. Granted, Hosna dealt with her gods by shouting demands at them, punctuated with the occasional smack. When your gods were the sometimes-cunning, sometimes-idiotic Old Ones, sheer force of will went a long way.

Hosna lifted her chin. “You are my guest. Anyone who comes to my house is fed.” A cloud of hummingbirds appeared. She lifted a cupped hand. One of the birds rested on it for a moment. “Even these birds. They are small but fierce. Take care near their nectar feeders, here. They will blind you to defend their territory.”

“Noted,” Abe said. He looked down at Hosna, close enough to catch her incense-heavy perfume. Her peerless eyes were, indeed, black as the void. They left him as undisturbed as her beauty. Abe wasn't sure if that meant he was above base urges and fears, or if this was a gentleman's reaction to a disinterested party. That reminded Abe why Hosna was alone on her doorstep. He said, “I was sorry to find out Tamara died, after you thought you would reunite with her here.”

Hosna sniffed. “It is very upsetting. But it is best to accept these things. Life goes on. Please, come in. You may leave your boots here.” Abe lined them up where Hosna pointed. The other shoes were two distinct sizes, small and large.

In the shady living room, every window was open. One of Hosna’s suitcases was there, stacked with books, a portable library. Abe liked her better for that. More books spread across a coffee table, topped by a half-wrapped tarot deck. The card on the top of the deck was a woman with one foot in the water, another on land. _The Star_. Abe pressed the vest pocket over his heart. Panya’s star ornament was still there, unbroken.

Hosna said, “I am renting here, with the option to buy. It was built for some Americans – can you believe, they did not speak Spanish when they moved here?”

“It’s got a lot of security,” Abe observed.

“Yes, that is what you need, here. Since you speak of security, your weapons, please?” Hosna lifted a basket. “Then I shall get you some coffee.”

If Abe was a welcome guest, it was up to him to be a good one. Abe extracted two pistols, a sap, and several knives. Hosna smiled, still holding the basket. Abe reached into the small of his back and pulled out his favorite, final diving knife. “That’s all, I promise. On my honor as a gentleman. No coffee just yet, thank you. Is Captain Henríquez here?”

Hosna had said she didn’t have much information for Abe – but she’d promised him someone who did. Remy Henríquez, the Brazilian captain of the most recent expedition to find the Baltimore Creature. Hosna had asked him to talk to them in person, for Remy wouldn’t believe in him, otherwise. Not after the way the expedition had failed. A crew of nine had chased Amazon sightings to hunt the Creature. Only two had returned, in a boat with bloodstained decks.

Since the expedition, Remy had neglected her email and phones, drifting through cheap lodgings in several countries. Abe didn’t feel great about questioning her, but she was the only available source. The expedition’s other survivor, and the local police, had evaporated into holiday celebrations or vanished on the Amazon’s rivers. 

“Yes. She is staying with me for a while. It was good of her to inform me of what had happened. Some hospitality,“ Hosna purred, “is a small return. And we have become very good friends – ah! Shoo!”

One of the hummingbirds had followed Hosna into the house. She swatted at it, but it ignored ten open windows and two doors to feint for the stairs. “No no no!”

"I'll get it for you," Abe said. But for all that his webbed hands were larger than baseball mitts, the tiny bird managed to elude him.

At the stairs, the buzzing bird was stopped by long legs coming down. The bird zoomed out the nearest window. Someone laughed, then spoke, in a measured, slightly accented voice.

“ _Un picaflor._ They follow Hosna around because she feeds them. Like all of us who have had the pleasure of her cooking.” Hosna simpered at the compliment. 

Its giver descended. She was tall and lean, in casual outdoors shorts, a camp shirt over a T-shirt. She stopped at the base of the stairs. “ _Madre de Dios._ You truly are a talking fish man.”

“Abe Sapien, ma'am. Bureau of Parnormal Research and Defense.”

At _ma'am_ , Remy's lip curled. She placed a hand over her heart and bowed a little – neatly avoiding shaking Abe’s own hand. “Remy Henríquez.”

For once, Abe was glad people stared when they first met him, because he was staring right back. From her file's photos, Abe recognized Remy's long, dark braid, her aviator sunglasses. With her height and her capable vibe, the river guide would have fit right in as a BPRD agent. But she was tense and raw-boned beneath her tan, and the brackets around her mouth weren’t smile lines. Sunglasses indoors made Abe remember Tim’s unbalanced pupils. Was that what Remy, too, hid? Abe realized his heart was hammering. He tore his gaze away, disturbed.

Remy edged away from the base of the stairs. She managed to circuit the space without turning her back on Abe once, all to pick a book from the coffee table. “To begin. My father’s logbook of his expedition to find another fish man. The first one.”

Abe flipped it open. It was copperplate handwriting, all in Spanish. _El aventura de Raul Romo Zavala Henríquez._ The volume, in Abe’s near-psychic hands, all but moaned aloud in pained regret.

Remy said, “I can translate, if you wish. Before that, I believe Hosna has something for us.” Abe handed the book over with relief. Remy gestured him towards an open door on the opposite side of the house. Abe tried to move gently as he went out to the back veranda.

At a table there, Hosna whisked a linen napkin off a plate. A braided bread ring was waiting, studded with fruit, nuts, and pearl sugar. Hosna brandished a sizeable chef’s knife above it. “This is the cake for Three Kings’ Eve – _rosca de reyes._ Very traditional, here. Tomorrow is _el Dia de los Reyes_ , the day of the Three Kings.”

As she sliced, Abe said, “Epiphany.”

“Exactly! It is traditional to serve this with hot chocolate. But I die at the idea of hot chocolate in this weather. So we have hibiscus iced tea, instead.” The drink was the color of blood.

Remy had eased over to Hosna's side of the table. There, she accepted a glass from Hosna. Her hand lingered over Hosna’s fingers. Hosna had a smug private smile for that. At the lack of space between them, Abe felt his brows lift. He’d seen women who were very good friends. Like Panya, Liz, and Kate at Christmas. These two weren’t. Not unless you were saying ‘good friends’ with air quotes.

What about Hosna’s supposed great love for Tamara? If Abe had been with someone for twenty-two years, it would take him more than six weeks to get over their death. Disappointed with human nature, Abe sat down.

Remy, served first, shredded her piece without eating it. “It’s not me,” she said.

Hosna pulled her wedge into two. “Nor me.”

Abe looked at his piece. A minute hand was sticking out of one side. Sliding a claw around it, he pulled out a tiny ceramic figurine of a baby.

Hosna declared, “Ah! You’re the lucky one – the king of Twelfth Night.”

“Lord of misrule,” Remy added.

“You are supposed to keep it for good luck,” Hosna said. Abe tucked the little figure into his vest pocket, next to Panya’s star ornament.

“Well! That is settled. You two can chat while I bring some fruit.” Hosna ‘left’ into the kitchen three meters away, taking the chef’s knife. She began to butcher an enormous papaya.

Remy reached for the log book. “Shall I translate some of my father’s stories for you?”

Since taking the glass from Hosna, Remy hadn’t turned away from Abe once. Abe remembered Giles saying, _it’s all about the body, what’s unspoken_. Remy's attention, her clenched jaw and squared shoulders, told a tale. She was a textbook case of paranormal PSTD. A watcher, striving to see the phenomenon again, to prove it had been real. He wondered if her yearning was so strong he was reading it from here, mistaking it for his own emotion.

Gently, Abe said, “I know it’s troubling, but I’d rather hear about your recent expedition. And anything you know about the creature. Deus Brânquia. Did I pronounce that right?”

“Mmm. Too well, perhaps…” Remy sighed. “Where shall I begin? With the folklore around Deus Brânquia? Or the way hunting him turned _gringos_ into _locos_?”

Reaching into her shirt pocket, she slid out a cigarillo. Abe caught that she tapped it against her wrist three times before reaching for a lighter. Just like Tim Strickland did.

Suddenly, Abe knew why Tim hadn’t been half grieved enough for his sister. Why Hosna was melting over someone she’d just met. Why he’d known, from the minute he’d seen her, this person had something he wanted.

“You’re Tammy Strickland, aren’t you.”

A dire silence fell. Hosna’s knife stopped chopping.

The woman across from Abe exhaled. She flicked the cigarillo away, snapped off the sunglasses. “Tam Caldwell, actually.”

Abe was riveted. Not only by the bluest eyes he’d ever seen. That well of energy he’d sensed in Baltimore had plunged open again, more compelling than ever.

Hosna pounced between Abe and Tam. “I didn’t lie to you! This is as close as you will ever get to Remy. You would have learned what you needed. I invited you into my home. If you do anything, I will – ” 

Abe barely heard her, still magnetized. Tam was swiping her face with a napkin, dragging away the braid, revealed as a wig. Makeup Abe hadn’t noticed came away. Without those few things, Tam was transformed. Her mouth was harder, tighter. Her real hair was buzzed to a short back and sides, blonde going white, save for a long wing of bangs. Those were pale at the roots, fading black at the tips.

Abe managed, “I’m not doing anything. I need to know exactly what’s going on – ”

Tam rose and banged a hand on the table in front of him. At this sudden violence, Abe rose, too. Tam stood her ground. “This wasn’t Hosna’s idea. It was mine. So, you deal with me.”

Hosna, unperturbed by this additional drama, spun to face Tam. “Yes! That’s why I brought him here. For _you!_ You don’t eat, you don’t sleep, you go for those walks – ” Abruptly, Hosna switched over to a different language, Arabic, for a liquid, flowing rant.

Tam clearly understood. As Hosna spoke, her expression stilled, softened. Until she looked at Abe again. “Walk with me.”

Abe asked, “Will you answer my questions?”

“I will if I can.” Tam strode off the veranda behind the house. Abe followed. He couldn't _not_ follow. Not when she took that energy away with her.

Freed of her sham identity, Tam moved confidently. She opened, then slammed, a gate to the back of the property, locking them out.

This done, Tam said, “I agreed to this because of Hosna – all your government bullshit took its toll on her. She’s worried about travel, about break-ins. Don’t even mention cats.” Abe winced.

“I thought if we got through this, talking to you, it would help her. Show her I could pull this off. You showed me, instead.” She’d dropped Remy’s accent for her own American voice, clipped and cultivated.

Tam continued. “On that expedition, I killed two of those men. So, when we’re done, can you lock me up for murder instead of insurance fraud? It’ll be less embarrassing.”

Abe considered himself warned. “I came to talk to Hosna in good faith. Not to lock anybody up.”

She shrugged. “You didn’t know I was alive. That changes things.”

Abe said, “There’s some legal leeway around paranormal incidents. What truly happened? Why did you pretend to be dead?”

Tam took a moment before answering. "I used to be a consulting archaeologist. At times…I was hired to be the sane white person."

Abe had no comment. She went on. "One of the indigenous people would have all the knowledge. Or there’d be some Yank or European who’d been the expert, until they’d lost credibility, one way or another. Liquor, falling for a local, diving into crackpot theories. Most of all, the ones obsessed with their finds, unable to leave their sites. I’d strip-mine them for information. Edit out the ranting and raving. Then I’d get the credit. The first few times, I thought I deserved it."

Tam shrugged. “That's me, now. I ruined my life to protect what I saw out there. What anyone but you wouldn’t believe.”

“The creature.”

“Yep.” They passed by a firewood stack drying in the sun. Tam reached into it, plucked out a machete. Abe remembered he had been thoroughly disarmed, separated from his vehicle. He figured he could take Tam, if he had to. Yet, as Tam bounced the machete in one hand, it seemed to unlock something in her.

“What happened...why you're here...either it began when I was ten. The night Deus Brânquia killed my father. Or about two months back. Maybe both. I had this anger management program from my therapist. Including meditation. Which I wasn’t great at, and that frustrated me. But it brought those two times together…”

One morning, her meditating had derailed into a sinister memory of Strickland’s cruelty. The same day, a job interview Tam had turned out to be with a renewed Occam. They were prepared to blackmail Tam, threatening Hosna. Giving in, Tam had received an edited take on the Baltimore Creature incident. In the present, Occam wanted to find the creature again, to wrest immortality from its DNA. They’d cited quantum physics, random attractors, re-creating the last expedition that had succeeded. So they’d swept Tam to Brazil, with specialists and local guides, for the ill-starred expedition.

“Looking back, I’m surprised it took us five days to start killing each other…” Tensions of every kind had run high. An interlude Tam described as a pleasant break in a village was, to Abe, rife with supernatural warnings. A day after Tam failed to heed her warnings, she was ill, drugged, wracked with haunted nightmares.

Abe shook his head. Dreams and visions were more real than people gave them credit for. And Tam had not been the only one afflicted with them on the expedition. The crew’s captain, Remy Henriquez, after failing to talk the Occam scientist out of the hunt, decided she had to stop it. Four of the crew died that night – half of them at Tam’s hands.

“I don’t know why my second murder was what made me lose my mind. Everyone was fine with that one. Self-defense. But it did…” Despite the horror, Abe was captivated. Tam was a compelling storyteller, wry and lyrical in turn, with a voice that rang true. Her force and charisma made her a match for Hosna. Abe wasn’t surprised that Tam had wound up in charge of the expedition's remnants. According to Tam, the wracked survivors had agreed there was only one thing to do. Keep hunting their now-shared obsession: Deus Brânquia.

Tam had led Abe to the bottom of a low rise. Tropical forest started up again, sheltering what was, to Abe, a piece of perfection. A small waterfall, cascading from a twenty-foot cliff, had carved out a pool, a natural swimming hole. Walled by forest on one side, it eased to a sandy edge at their feet. The shaded water over-ran into another little fall.

Tam then described the expedition’s trap for the creature – art and music, set where he'd been sighted, to lure him close. Incredibly, it had worked. “This rain sheeted down, and he was there. I saw why they called him the Devonian. He was gorgeous and terrible and…next to him I was this – this primitive mammal. Freaking out before a primal predator. I pulled it together because if I didn’t bring him in, that was it for Hosna. I’d say we grappled, but he was strangely peaceful about it. Physically, at least.”

“Then… this is where it gets weird.” Tam closed her eyes. “He opened my mind.”

“I saw his perceptions. The way he saw the universe.”

Abe gasped. “And he saw yours. He was reading you.”

Tam’s eyes flew wide. “Yes! Reading me like a book! Everything about me, including shit I’d brushed off my whole life. Everything I’d done wrong. I saw why our other men died rather than go through that. I wanted to rip my own throat out. But — ” 

Tam paused. And the silence was the first false note in her story. It had the weight of a lie, something untold. “I didn’t. For just long enough that he finished with that. And I saw his world at last, without my garbage in the way, and…oh.” She covered her eyes with her free hand, swaying with honest pain. 

Abe couldn’t hold off any more. “After seeing him, experiencing him, are he and I alike? Or he some earlier version of me?” Giles had said he wasn’t. Tim had shown Abe he was further from humanity than he’d hoped. Tam’s encounter blew all that out of the water.

Tam said, “No offense, if you’re here talking to me, you’re a couple of levels _behind_. Unless you’re an immortal mind-reader with a four-dimensional sense of time.”

And didn’t that send a chill over Abe’s gills. For Tam didn’t know about Abe’s extra-sensory perceptions, nor that Abe hadn’t aged a day since he’d joined the BPRD.

She mused, “You’re similar, but so different. Your texture. The set of your eyes. If – I’m sorry. Can I touch your wrist? It’ll help me answer.”

“Of course.” Abe offered his right hand.

Tam grasped it in a firm handshake. At the touch, he had a glimpse of Tam’s mind: aching curiosity, relief at satisfying it, exhaustion at what might come after this. She was an analyzer, very like Kate Corrigan. But where Kate’s intelligence had a quicksilver quality, Tam was all steel. Preparing to judge him.

As that came to him, Tam shifted. Her fingers rested on his wrist’s pulse. She muttered, "You're warm-blooded. He's not."

Abe thought that was it. Until she pressed down in a painful nerve pinch. “Ouch!”

Tam, absorbed, did not apologize. More, Abe watched incredulously as, releasing him, she _tasted_ her fingertips.

That decided her. “No.” Her verdict rang with grief and regret.

Abe felt it as keenly as she did. “Can you tell me where he is?”

“I’ll show you.” Tam used the machete at last, hacking a pathway through the plants to the left of the pool. It seemed cruel to the poor greenery, until Tam said, “Watch out for the branches. There’s leeches.” He stayed close.

Abe followed Tam to the pool’s second fall. Her clearing work made room for two on a serious edge. Below them, a steep hill dropped into a vast spread of jungle, flat to the far horizon.

Tam said, “That’s the Amazon basin. Two million square miles of rainforest. It looks untouched, but it’s not. Right below, it used to be rubber plantations, worked by child slaves. The boom finished, and the trees swallowed it back up. I hear they want to rip it up again for oil drilling. Further north, in Colombia, for every indigenous person, there’s ten smugglers. But in the middle… somewhere… he’s there.”

Abe cleared his throat. “Do you know where, exactly?”

Tam glared. “We’re back where we started. I destroyed my life so I wouldn’t tell somebody like you. Leave him alone.”

“I don’t ask lightly.”

Tam cut Abe off. “I never finished my story. I walked away and faked my death to get back to Hosna while dodging Occam. Because Deus Brânquia needs to be out there. He’s – some kind of life force. In a body like us, but connected to something beyond. A god in the flesh. I know I sound crazy. If you weren't what you are, I wouldn't say this - but you are, and I can't _not_ tell you, not with you here. Believe me. All that, out there,” Tam gestured at the green world below, “It needs him. Somehow. That’s more important than we are.”

"I do believe you. " Abe pleaded, “I would never hurt a being who was doing no harm. All I want is what you had. You met him. You know what you are!”

Again, that mirthless Strickland laugh. “I’ll say. I’m a murderer, the _corta cabeza_. A liar and a fugitive. I’m here because Deus Brânquia is merciful – ”

Tam’s own words made her pause. She looked away, over the eternal jungle, eyes on its green horizon. Abe felt her in the grip of her own emotional undertow. He held his breath.

“Deus Brânquia is merciful,” Tam repeated, slowly. “And…there may be another way. Because I’m also a thief.”

Abe's heart stopped, the way it did before a deep dive. “What have you got? A map? A, a talisman?”

Her smile was edged. “Nothing that classy. In this region, there’s a drug, a plant, ayahuasca. They say it’ll give you visions of the jungle’s guardian, the White Lady. Half the tourists who come here give it a shot. That’s not what I stole. There’s another drug that they _don’t_ give to the tourists. And this one will, for sure, have you talking to Deus Brânquia.”

Abe knew instantly what she meant. She'd mentioned it in her story. “The forest plant the hunters on your crew took, to see the forest better. Buchíte.”

“That’s right.”

“What plant is it?”

“I don’t know. I’m the wrong person to ask. Our indigenous tracker died, like the rest. I nicked it from his gear afterwards. One dose, you see the world more…clearly, I’m told. Two rounds is when it gets interesting.” She lowered her arresting eyes. “It’s yours if you want it.”

Abe lived a fairly abstemious life, saying that his body was a temple. Yet, a natural herb, part of an indigenous tradition... “Have you tried it?”

“Not yet. One of the Americans with us did. His first time, he doubled up, thinking it wasn’t working. Looking back, even after the buchíte, he tried to talk sense to me. Tried to protect the others from – well. Anyway, I believe it, that Deus Brânquia would talk to him. He was a good man.”

Such a tempting version of a self, bound up with communion to the gill-god. Nigh irresistible. If he was willing to open his temple gates for the fluid energy he felt, out there, waiting. “I’ll try it, then.”

Tam nodded. “Wait here.”

Abe followed her to wait at the edge of the forest pool. He watched her go, considering how the Baltimore Creature, benevolent as it seemed to be, had a way of luring everyone to transgression for its sake.

Abe went through the web of lies and lawbreaking everyone had woven around the Baltimore Creature. Elisa, stealing the creature from federal custody. Her friend Zelda helping, too. Hoffstetler, helping more, taking all the blame. Giles, muffling the truth in a fairy-tale. Tim’s posturing and dismissiveness, trying to throw Abe off the trail about his sister being alive. Hosna drawing Abe in, the closest being to the amphibian-man she could find, as an offering to her lover. Tam erasing as much of herself as she could, again to kill the trail.

Two generations, drawn into the madness of trying to protect and save…Charlie? The Devonian? Deus Brânquia? A creature that mirrored Abe enough to wrench these people’s hearts with pain through his presence. Perhaps the creature was nearby, for Abe to be feeling that compelling energy. And with Abe's own eyes given that extra spark, he too could hunt.

Abe heard women debating. Tam was approaching, with Hosna flouncing behind her. To Abe’s relief, neither of them had the machete.

Hosna said, “Do you really know what you’re doing, Abraham? It is no small thing to summon a god.”

"Rest assured, I do.” Abe couldn’t deny the call he felt, the rightness of this place, this moment. “Could I take it down here? By this waterfall?”

Tam said, “I thought you’d want that. Dose up, chill out down here for a few hours…I’ll show you how.” She opened her hand on a plastic bag filled with fine yellow-gold shavings. “From what I saw, this is two doses. I think you’ll need it all.”

Hosna snapped, “If you give it all to him, you’ll never – ”

Tam said, serenely, “I know.”

As Abe took on board what Tam was giving up, she reached into the plants edging the pool. There, she plucked a long strap of a leaf. Cupping water, she splashed the buchíte shavings so they lumped into a paste. She wrapped the leaf-strap around the lump for a triangular package. The result was a natural eyedropper, a tawny drop of fluid at one tip.

“It’s easy. I just drip it into your eyes. Ready when you are.”

Abe went down on one knee in front of Tam.

Hosna said, “Well! One thing is certain. Your father would be proud of you.”

Tam drawled, “Hosna! Don’t even mention him.”

Abe looked up. “What makes you say that?”

Tam did not reply. Instead, she placed her left hand on Abe’s cheek, tilting his face up. He felt her curiosity, her blend of envy and relief, the soft draw of her pulling down the lower edge of his left eye.

“Look up.” He saw blurry fingertips and a green bundle. And felt hot-acid agony.

Abe managed to stay where he was, swaying, through that first blaze. After Tam did his other eye, he had to turn away and hammer the ground, temporarily blind. He heard himself gasping curses, heard Hosna’s chiming laugh. Knew what she’d meant. Tam’s father, Strickland, had tortured the creature in captivity. Here and now, Abe was reliving something of the gill-god’s torment. Yet he had chosen it, hoping it would bring him and the creature closer. His sacrifice to open the gates.

As Abe understood his suffering, his vision cleared. When it did, the ground was _fascinating._ The woven grass and the textures of roots and minerals held him. It was the reverse of faerie glamour being stripped away. Instead, he felt he saw the true, hidden enchantment of the natural world.

He heard Tam say, “I’m sorry it hurt. I thought it might not, because you’re so different.”

Abe was challenged to reply. Because Tam was, suddenly, a somber blonde child in a full-skirted dress, clutching a sock monkey. The child asked, “Is it working?”

“Perhaps it is different for him, if he is not human.” Abe saw that Hosna’s arms were caged in glowing violet lines, a geometry of power at her fingertips. Her shadow, in the midday sun, arched in the silhouette of a black goat.

Abe stood, shakily. “I think so.”

“How does the forest look, now?”

It was a mystic world of beckoning layers. Each individual color breathed with life, deeply important. In the pool, the water’s fall was music, its shimmering a dance calling him to join it. Abe felt his chest glowing, filled with energy.

Tam was different again, too. Now Abe saw her as an old woman in threadbare adventurer’s gear, hair silver-white, arms striped with tattooed bands. A great golden monkey perched on one of her shoulders. “I…think I can see through time.”

Both women laughed. Hosna chimed, “That sounds promising!”

Abe swallowed. Hosna had no shadow, now: or she was the shadow. Woman and goat and noonday darkness had merged together with unspeakable appeal. “Uh…”

“Up for your second round?” Abe looked to Tam for the third time. And saw an angel between worlds, laced with more bright geometries, luminous and terrible. Her right hand cupped a small plant. The plant’s oval leaves shimmered and blinked, revealing and hiding shining eyes.

Tam saw him hesitate, spoke like the herald she was. “You can do it. I know. Remember, another man got through this. The one who talked to Deus Brânquia this way.” _Be not afraid._

Abe swallowed again, feeling himself running dry. He knelt.

This second time, the agonizing burn was worse. After the first eye, Abe curled on himself, gasping, blocking out Hosna's bleat, half-mocking, half-encouraging. Tam’s cool voice urged, “Open. Please. Open one last time…”

When Tam tried to dose his second eye, it was too much. Abe’s reflexes jerked him away. Not that this brought relief. The movement sent the splash of buchíte to scorch his gills, battery acid etching him. With a pealing cry, he leapt up, lungs and heart on fire.

Water – the only thing – that beckoning water –

He dove.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Abe does drive! I checked. In the comics, when he and Hellboy are in the field, Abe's the one who drives - he can have both hands on the wheel.
> 
> Is this out of character? Is Abe straightedge? In the movies, Abe Sapien _says_ his body is a temple but - and I say this as a mostly-nondrinker over here - he accepts a beer from Hellboy pretty quickly with a little peer pressure. In the comics, we see him enjoy the occasional cigar (!) or measure of liquor. ["The time Abe got drunk!" ](https://bloody-disgusting.com/comics/3475363/exclusive-hellboy-shares-christmas-memories-hellboy-krampusnacht-images/) photo-drawing at the back of one of the Hellboy Krampusnight winter comic seems to show that Abe overindulging is pretty unusual. A fellow fan and I came to the conclusion that Comics!Abe, with the prospect of a Revelation at hand, would partake. And for this story...


	5. Star of Wonder

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Abe Sapien needs all the gifts he’s received to get past the Amazon’s haunting spirits and encounter a river-god, and someone else, too. A princess whose silence both enlightens Abe and gives him more questions than ever.

There was water, Abe Sapien knew, and then there was _water_. The alchemical element. The ideal.

This was it.

The water Abe had leapt into was the purest he'd ever known. Sprung from Andes snowmelt, from cloud forest rains. Untouched by man, clear and superb. Letting it take him was pure bliss. It soothed Abe’s scorched gills like chilled silk, filled his body with sweet relief, then steady strength.

It felt wrong to surface, to lift his face into the air, but he did. Abe looked to the little shore. There, amidst dry harshness, two primates clung to each other. Abe pitied them, enmeshed in the waterless tangle, denied this purity. Three swimmer’s strokes took him to the pool’s plunge, its waterfall down. Heeding its call, he filled his lungs with water, leapt up. And dove.

The fall was high enough for Abe to jackknife, make an arrow of himself. He pierced the fall’s plunge pool flawlessly. Submerged anew, he stroked out from the fall’s churn. The fall’s current, so clear it was nearly blue, pierced and blended into different water, greenish gold, sun-warmed. Abe tasted its acidic tang, saw it clouded with silt and plants, heard its bubbling cascade. Yet the flood of strength that had filled Abe in the spring-pool remained, like part of his soul was still there.

Abe had forgotten why he was swimming amidst such glory. It came back to him now. He was in one of the Amazon’s tributaries. The territory of the creature, Deus Brânquia, the gill-god. Abe knew without doubt that, if ever he was to meet with that creature, this was his chance. He kicked away, letting the tributary’s current take him. 

Soon, Abe realized he was swimming between immense, buttressed tree trunks. The jungle he’d seen from above must be flooded to its rainy-season peak. A sharp-edged tangle below caught his eye. Abe dipped down to see what it was.

It was pollution: rusty, drowned agricultural equipment. Abe remembered what the tall primate – Tam – had told him about rubber gatherers and plantations in this jungle. Shaking his head at their explotiation’s ruin, Abe exhaled water to lift away.

That was when something grabbed his ankles.

Immediately, Abe’s hands swiped to the small of his back, the knife that lived in these diving trousers. It wasn’t there. He’d surrendered it to Hosna. Turned about, Abe saw what was trying to hold him. The equipment’s rusty stain through the water was birthing myriad ghosts, small and dark, pitiable and terrible. They were the perished child-slaves of the dead plantation. Ten, no, twenty pairs of tiny, skeletal hands solidified to seize him.

In death, they were as wiry-strong as they’d been in life. When Abe shook one leg free, they seized the other, grappled up him with deadly persistence. Their chill touches poured their loneliness and hunger into Abe. They wanted, oh, they wanted, with awful innocence, with children’s consuming rage and fear. Everywhere they touched him, they sucked his living warmth away.

One of them flowed up in front of his face. Abe saw its empty eye sockets, its pathetic ribcage. He could have smashed it with one swipe of his webbed, clawed hand. But this one, alone, wasn’t grappling him. Instead, it held out a small, worn shoe.

For one instant, Abe stared, confused. Then he blessed Kate Corrigan. After her Epiphany spiel, he’d researched, too. Epiphany was when children got their holiday presents, here. The Wise Men, following yonder star, stopped on their way to give children their gifts. Leaving them in the children’s shoes.

Abe snapped one arm to free it from three clutching ghostlets, dove into his vest’s pocket. The baby figurine from Hosna’s _reyes_ cake was still there. Abe placed it into the child’s shoe.

As Abe did, the hideous little ghost fleshed out. For one moment, a pretty toddler clutched the toy-filled shoe, dark eyes shining. The bony hands clutching Abe softened, loosened, vanished, just like the child in front of him, all spiraling away into coils of cold silt. 

The tiny toy had given the poor phantoms the Epiphany they’d never had. Abe remembered his Christmas cracker riddle. _Who gives baby sharks their presents? Santa Jaws…_

Heart breaking, Abe swam on.

After a time, the water brightened around him. Abe glanced up. The water had widened enough that rainforest trees no longer shaded this tributary’s entire flow. The current strengthened, too. Abe let it all pull him into a second river. Or he tried to – for the way was blocked.

Abe drew up in astonishment at the vision before him. She hung in the water between thick beams of sunlight. The jungle’s guardian was there to meet him: the White Lady.

This White Lady wasn’t as ethereal as he’d expected. Abe had pictured a figure of Victorian romance, all flowing robes and paleness. Yet she was modern. Dark hair floated at her tawny cheekbones. Her white pantsuit gleamed palest beryl under the green water. With a satchel over one shoulder and her chin tilted high, she was ready for this meeting.

Abe wanted to ask, _Frida Kahlo, is that you?_ But a green viper slipped out of her shirt to pour over one shoulder, hissing silently at him. Its puffy mouth promised venom. Briefly, it left the White Lady to swim to her other shoulder, where she met it with a caressing hand. Her viper vanished up her sleeve.

This left the White Lady staring at Abe sternly. She let him know what side she was on by making the sign of the cross, then placing her hands on her hips. Waiting.

Abe went for his vest pocket a second time. Panya’s star ornament waited there. He tapped it to his own throat, then held it out to her, offering.

Eyes wide with wonder, the White Lady reached for it. Abe handed it over, or tried to. But it slipped through her ghostly fingers. When the current took it, she shrugged, flashing a brilliant smile. Seeing the fluid tilt of her shoulders, her mouth bracketed with smile lines, Abe knew who this fantasm was. This was the dead woman whose name Tam had stolen. The Amazon captain who had killed and died for Deus Brânquia.

The viper had emerged to wrap her left arm. She used her right arm, instead, to gesture Abe away. Urging him further down the river. He swam around her to the right, giving her a wide berth. She nodded. Abe gave her a salute as he swam away.

In this larger river, all sense of the water having banks had vanished. Experimentally, Abe dropped deeper, finding olive-colored darkness. He swam up and up, into near-golden waters. Now that the White Lady had granted him passage, these waters were alive. Shoals of small fish, living curtains, split for him, tickling him as he swam through them. Birds dove in and out. Larger fish sank out of his way, but slowly, as if he was not the greatest threat in the river. A startled manatee bubbled in astonishment. Abe waved at it.

Abe coursed along, marveling at this harmony with nature. This was the creature’s world. How cruel it had been, Abe thought, for the creature to be torn from his place, his way of being, after uncounted millennia. Abe hoped the creature had found some peace here.

An eel, fully Abe’s length, scaleless as he was, slid beside him in the water. It was eye to eye with him. Its penetrating stare reminded him, somehow, of Tim Strickland. Abe held out a spread hand to see if the eel would let Abe touch him. Abe had an instant’s delight when it did, nudging its forehead along his wrist, nuzzling the spot where Tam had hurt him. He opened himself to read this Amazon life. Instead, from that spot, two electric jolts snapped along his arm.

Abe vented in pain, recoiled at what he felt. This electric eel held the residue of some rotted spirit. It was a morass of indistinct memory, sticky with id, with lust and hate. Worse, Abe had roused it – for one of the few clear things about it was that it hungered for the creature.

Abe wasn’t the creature. But, for this evil thing, he was close enough.

It spread its jaws, needle-teeth ready to shear Abe’s flesh. Abe steeled himself to grab its length, trying to snap its spine. It writhed in Abe’s grasp, incredibly strong. _Take a bite out of you,_ its mind hissed, lucid with focus on Abe. _See how you like it._ Then, it fired another doubled shock. Abe convulsed, curling on himself. The eel circled, vibrating more shocks through the water.

The contractions sent the last of the pool’s pure spring-water out from Abe’s lungs, a brief flush of relief. Abe uncoiled. As he did, his left hand brushed that long side pocket of his trousers. What was in there wasn’t meant to be a weapon. But it was what Abe had.

Abe flicked open the pocket’s Velcro, yanking out Giles’ long, skinny paintbrush. With one snap, Abe held two sharp spikes. He smiled, bubbles seething through his own sharp teeth. Stabbing out, Abe speared the eel’s slimy flesh with both spikes. It was that thing’s turn to convulse, snapping wildly. Abe surged upwards, spreading his arms, slitting the eel from its belly to its throat. Black blood and repulsive yellow guts filled the water. Abe kicked his finned feet to take him up, away, free.

Triumphant, Abe tilted his head back, rewarded by a clean current. Something stroked his chin. Abe glanced down to see that Giles’ two artworks had slid free, following the paintbrush, to float up and away. The drawing of the creature and Elisa was close enough to grab – if Abe was quick.

Abe chased it along the current. Giles must have powdered it with some gilding in his studio. It sparkled as it softened and twisted in the water. He almost had it when the current eddied, spinning up, taking the dissolving drawing with it. Abe saw it tear, at last, into two halves, phosphorescent shreds. The eddying current whirled the largest rag of paper up. Abe followed it – and saw it caught against a finned foot. One that joined a biped’s calf.

He looked up, out of his tight focus on the paper, and gasped silently. For there, treading water, staring at him in equal astonishment, was the creature. 

Abe recognized him beyond a doubt. From the records, from Giles’ graceful sketch, most of all from the energy he’d felt with Tim in Baltimore, been feeling here. Abe swam up to tread water in front of the creature. As Tam had said, they were alike, yet unlike. Abe was grateful for what those three had given him, angry at what they hadn’t, overcome with awe.

For none of them had told him the creature pulsed with living light.

The luminance transformed the creature. When he dimmed, he was the perfect match for these rich green waters. Abe’s smooth-striped skin was nakedness compared to him. He was rough with fins, scales, muscular striations. His hands and feet were massive, more heavily clawed and webbed. Any genitals were modestly concealed. He could be at one with the giant fish and rippling river-weeds. Or he could be this. This radiant _intelligence_ , lights shimmering, hands and thumbs shaping, offering communications Abe was too unevolved to understand.

The creature seemed to realize Abe’s capabilities at last. He pointed at Abe. Then, at his own gills. Then, back at Abe.

Abe nodded. They were slowly turning in the water, caught in some compatible drift. Abe held out his right hand, unsteady. Would reading this sublime other be too much for him? Could he brush against this being and come away sane? He had to know.

The creature lifted one of its own hands, uttering a curious keen. Of his own volition, he gripped, engulfing Abe’s considerable hand and wrist in his own. That touch laved Abe with thick, silken slime, soothing where Abe had been nerve-pinched and shocked. Abe marveled at the hand, flashing with lines of blue bioluminescence, and let himself take in –

_a vision he is barely large enough to hold, a fisheye lens explosion, perceptions widening, the world dark alight alive in every way, a plunge of eons before this now, an arc of time ahead, flow endless as this riverseaswamp this worldcore water this home this being who tells him_

_we were alone but knowing it would end was the same as not being alone, now this one is here, beginning his end too, two-legs, salt-swimmer, deep-water, from gods that are not river gods, bad ones and good ones and he feels with us he loves loves loves_

_welcome_

They released each other. The moment of communion had been brief, perfect. Abe knew he was grinning like a loon. The creature’s mouth, the most human thing about him, a perfect match for Giles’ Leyendecker-drawing moments, lifted a little. He, too, was smiling.

The current sent something swooping between Abe’s face and the creature. It was Giles’ second drawing, miraculously still in one piece. Abe held up one finger, hoping that meant _wait_ , and tried to catch it. The creature called, piercingly, in what seemed like response.

Abe saw the paper swish behind the creature. He curved that way, reaching for it. But its lightness was elusive, taking it out of his reach. Coming around the creature’s other side from below, Abe saw the backlit silhouette of an arm seizing the paper. He surged up, ready to sign gratitude.

And uttered his own underwater cry. Because he’d almost smacked into a third biped. Between him and the creature, this other spun, silver as a spill of sequins, to gasp bubbles in Abe’s face. Abe had contemplated her own face for days, poring over the Baltimore Creature’s case records. He’d know her anywhere now, even here.

The woman the records said was dead. The princess without a voice. Elisa Esposito.

Her hair streamed like dark, tattered silk. Her skin was silvery, laced here and there with helpful fins. She still struck Abe as human, for all that she was transformed, marine, piscine. She was breathing comfortably in this river. Her neck was venting water. Gilled.

_Like him._

The creature was chattering, flashing, signing all at once. Elisa, with a silent movie’s comic timing, glanced at Abe, the creature, the picture, the creature, Abe. She pointed at Giles’ flamboyant signature at the bottom of the drawing. Abe saw her eyes widen. They, too, were like his, almost entirely whiteless.

Abe only recovered when she almost touched him, cupping her hands around his face.“Miss Esposito? You're alive?”

Abe said that - or tried to. But the water blunted human speech into bubbles, and she drifted back. Elisa was still checking him out, top to toe. Taking in Abe’s clothes, vest and cropped trousers, she looked down at herself, gloriously bare. She lifted her hands, lips parting. Her finger clasped to her thumb for a gesture: _OK!_

Abe shook his head, raised open palms, doing his best to say, please, it’s nothing.

She, in turn, opened her hands and her mouth in an overall spread of astonishment.

Abe tapped the BPRD badge attached to his vest. Elisa zoomed close to peer. Abe saw her mouthing letters, like she barely remembered them. When she did, she shrugged: BPRD meant little or nothing to her. With a shy glance down at herself, she kicked back to the creature, let his strong arm ring her waist.

Abe tried repeating her astounded-hand spread. He cupped both his hands around his neck, amplifying his gills, then pointed back to Elisa. How had she gotten her gills, he meant.

In response, Elisa beamed. She gestured towards the creature. Following this, she layered her two angled hands over her heart, pressed in for a beat, then leaned back against the creature, adoringly. The creature laid his sculpted cheekbone against her head and vented satisfaction.

She was in love, she meant, and with the creature. In love, and alive, and nothing else mattering…

The creature nipped Elisa’s ear. With her attention, he made a few signs. Abe gargled in shock as Elisa, too, lit up. Her skin was constellated with silver points of light, thousands of stars. From the safety of the creature’s embrace, she dared to stretch an arm towards Abe.

Very cautious, Abe reached out to brush her with his fingertips. Prepared, again, to read.

Elisa’s varied, shifting self came to him like the flickers of an old movie. Images veered among a gray orphanage, sepia-nostalgia movie theaters, the green tiles and yellow warning signs of the Cold War. Abe caught the stinging smell of bleach, the taste of sugary pie and Cool Whip, the ache of tired feet, heard a kind woman laughing, Giles chatting away. It was all swept aside by a technicolor whirl of emotion. Abe sensed music and adrenaline and enemies all at once, felt Elisa’s passions. Love, fear and defiance and more fear, the happy ending she had literally dreamed about. Enchanting transformation, at the creature’s caring hands.

Abe drew back, staggered. His communion before showed Abe he wasn’t like the water-god everyone, including himself, had compared him to. He wasn’t embodied eons, a force primeval yet playful. No, the creature recognized Abe, welcomed him, because he was like _her_. Like Elisa. She’d been human and changed. Slid into otherness, into being something more, dancing away into these deeps. All for love.

Desperately, Abe tried signing again. He stroked a hand down himself, pointed at Elisa, held his hands open. Doing his utmost to ask what he’d meant before, _are we the same?_

To his embarrassment, Elisa completely misinterpreted this. Her cheeks went pink: her lips pursed in a withheld kiss. Pointing to herself, she pointed at the creature next, not Abe. As if she thought he was saying that he wanted her, and she was replying _that’s great, I’m taken_. Though she did follow this by looking Abe up and down again, with a very cheeky smile. She turned within the creature’s embrace to sign to her mate, rising slightly so they were forehead to forehead.

They broke their conclave by spreading apart slightly, each holding out an arm. Abe realized, heart breaking anew, he was being invited to join their embrace. Before he could hesitate, their hands, both sliding slick, ran over his shoulders, to meet behind his solar plexus.

Without any effort, Abe felt what they felt, together. A unity flooding any divisions, just like this river overflowed its banks. Amidst the creature’s flow of life, the beauty they perceived together, selves were the barest flicker of distinction. _I can see through time_ , Abe had quipped, before. That was the merest preview of this, past and future meaningless, life and death both transparent as water.

The flood was pierced by one of Elisa’s film-flicker moments, screened for Abe. Somehow, it was a memory both he and Elisa shared. That one snip of music from Giles’ studio, _you’ll never know if you don’t know now…_

The perception and emotion were too much. Abe slipped away, held up two index fingers. He hoped they understood what he meant. _Wait a minute_. They released the hands they’d joined, paused like time meant nothing. Suspended in this water, warm as the tears Abe could not weep, the love that surrounded them.

As the universe spun down to himself again, Abe realized what the music had seeded in him. He had to talk to Elisa. If she was like the creature, she could be in the air for a short time. He pointed up, to the river’s shimmering surface.

Again, this was misinterpreted. Elisa pointed at her gills. She didn’t need to be up there to breathe.

Abe shook his head. What he’d felt was both too much and not enough. He’d read Elisa – it was unfair – he had to open himself to her, too. She couldn’t read him back. He needed to tell her his story, learn more of hers. Even her yes-or-no signs could help him figure out how he was like her. How he could find her grace.

Abe kicked himself up, beckoning. The eddying current twisted him upwards. As it did, the creature uttered a piercing yawp, like a warning.

Abe glanced down. Elisa’s silver face was turned to him, eyes compressed in sweet sadness, the palm of her hand flashing. She was blowing him a kiss. 

He reached down to them, urging them to follow, right as he breached, and –

Abe flung his head back, eyes flickering as they hit the air. He reached out. Abe found neither Elisa nor the creature had joined him. Instead, darkness bewildered him. He had not surfaced into sunlight, but reddish night.

He was back in the pool where he’d started.

Abe’s adrenaline always spiked when he surfaced. He might need to fight or flee, especially now. For someone was near the water’s edge, sitting by a smoky fire.

Abe’s thoughts were barely articulate: _primate, fire, judgement_. He floundered close enough to stand. After the flight-like freedom of swimming, walking was clumsy, inefficient. Abe's body sealed itself against the air, separation and solitude again.

Names returned to Abe. He realized that the primate waiting to greet him was a human. Tam stood wearily, the lines of her face carved hard by the firelight. When Abe turned away and looked back, she stayed the same, firmly middle-aged. 

Tam said, “You’ve been curled up at the bottom there since you jumped in. Twelve hours. You okay?”

Twelve hours? In one place? Impossible. Abe felt his breast pocket. It was empty of its trinkets. His thigh pocket was empty, too.

Tam asked, “Did it work?”

Stripped of all his gifts, heart shattered open, Abe found his tongue again. He croaked, “Elisa. Elisa! She’s out there, too, isn’t she.”

Tam said nothing. But she stooped to pick something up: the machete, again, held across her. Ready.

“I saw them. The two of them. The creature. Elisa. Together.” Bereft, sparked with anger at the loss, Abe realized what Tam had left out of her own story. His hands coiled to fists. “You saw her! She’s the one who – why – why didn’t you say – ”

Tam’s body tensed. Her change in angle tilted the machete, edged it with red firelight. “On the expedition, we went crazy enough thinking about Deus Brânquia. Think what we would’ve been like if we’d known what he could do. Change people into something like you.”

Abe’s other world came back to him. The BPRD. Reports. Duties. His past. Experiments, with him as the subject.

“Imagine the _hell_ Occam would have put Elisa through. As a woman.” Tam’s voice was raw.

He uncoiled his fists. “Yes…”

“You understand?”

“I…I’m working on it.” Abe came up to the water’s edge.

Tam said, “It took me a while. Until today.”

Abe raised an open hand. “I…understand what you gave me. Why Tammy Strickland died. I’ll be able to say that Remy Henríquez confirmed a final version of events.”

Tam’s breath hitched. “Thank you.” She lowered the machete. “Want something to eat? Hosna made mezze.”

Abe shook his head. “I am still…”

“Nauseous? It’s fine if you need to throw up.”

Abe smiled for the first time since surfacing. “It’s not that. Simply that I’m not…done here, quite yet.”

“Either way. Take your time. I’ll head back up, wait for you at the gate.” With that, Tam left him there, between fire and water.

Alone.

In Abe's world of mystic threats, psychic co-workers, and prophecies that rated probability reports, no dream was _only_ a dream. Had space been warped as well as time on his buchite trip? Or had his soul coursed the river to meet Elisa and the creature in their own dreaming? Either way, something of what had happened was real.

To clear his head, Abe tallied the time, the date. Twelve hours. That meant it was January 6th. The day of Epiphany.

He looked back at the pool and its falls. But the fire had destroyed his night vision. It was all shadows. And if he turned back, plunged into the Amazon to go find them in the flesh, that left a trail.

Abe tilted his head back. The night sky, he could see. The vast span of unlit rainforest made this place a dark-sky oasis. The great bar of the Milky Way was brilliant overhead. The longer he looked, the more stars Abe saw. As many as the silvery spangles that had lit Elisa. Far, far more than the one star three wise men had once followed. More wisdom than he could take in.

To think that it had been Elisa, all along, who held an answer. If he’d believed Giles’ fairy-tale as the truth, he would have known from the start. For Elisa’s purpose was clear – she had been marked for, lived for, been transformed by, love.

It couldn’t be that simple for him.

Could it?

That he, too, could be loved that way – as a princess without a voice and the creature loved – felt as impossible as it had at the beginning. Yet each of the people touched by the creature had shifted him towards that. Giles’ artistry, Tim’s louche assumptions, Hosna’s hospitality, Tam’s confessions and generous, awful mercy. Most of all, Elisa, with her adventurous joy. They had all, each in their way, treated him like one of them. It eased Abe’s urgency to know what he was if others welcomed him that way.

Then there was the creature’s thought of him _. Beginning his own end._ Of his own aloneness, or of the world? It came to Abe that the creature, rent from the life-rich world Abe had seen, had nearly died in captivity. That Tam still feared for his - their - existence. With what the BPRD fought against, and the way those fights were escalating, she was more right than she knew.

If the world spiraled down, what then? Was the creature’s arc of future time a foretelling, or simply one path, a best-case scenario?

Abe decided. He would protect them, too. With his work for the BPRD, how they kept the world turning. And by joining the others touched by the creature in their decades-long cover-up. False stories to protect the truest one, that tale of love and loss. That was one step into aloneness on its own, for he’d be lying to his people. His friends. Maybe even to Hellboy. It would take something of his life – wherever it led from here.

Abe knelt to read the pool’s water one final time. It was what he had felt before, and no more. Elemental, pure, empty. He cupped spring water in his hands. It half-filled them in the shape of a heart. He lowered his face and drank. Despite its purity, submerging himself a last time didn’t feel right. It wouldn’t be the same as being surrounded by their element.

He would have to find his own.

With that, he stepped away. Leaving the water for the fire.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you, readers! As a final gift Totallyottie99 did [some art](https://totallyottie99.tumblr.com/post/180971192595/heres-a-little-gift-for-my-friend#notes) for this last chapter! I love Abe's face during The Hug.


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